Kosovo Blowback: Muslim Albanians from Kosovo Plot Terror Attack in the United States

More details of the foiled plot will emerge in coming days, but this much is clear. Six men, described as “Islamic militants,” had planned a suicide attack on the U.S. Army’s base at Fort Dix with the intention of killing as many American soldiers as possible. Four of the arrestees are described as ethnic Albanians from the former Yugoslavia -- i.e., from Kosovo.

Kosovo? How many Americans still remember Kosovo?

Back in 1999, the NATO alliance waged a 78-day air war against Serbia, ostensibly to protect minority Albanian Muslims in Serbia’s Kosovo province, which was placed under United Nations administration and NATO military control. (During the war, some 4,000 Kosovo Albanians were housed at Fort Dix.) The intervention was “successful” in one sense: Kosovo was made a playground for criminal and jihad terrorist elements of the supposedly disbanded “Kosovo Liberation Army” (KLA), who dominate the province’s civil administration (under U.N. authority) and maintain a reign of terror over Kosovo’s still-dwindling Christian Serb population.

Churches and monasteries that have not already been desecrated, blown up, or burned by mobs of Muslim Albanians exist under tenuous protection from NATO. Kosovo remains Europe’s black hole of organized crime – drugs (heroin derived from Afghan opium), sex slaves (including children), weapons – and the criminal gateway to the rest of the continent (not to mention a significant Albanian mafia presence in New York City).

Even more dangerously, major KLA figures have documented links to jihad terror sponsors such as the government of Iran and al-Qaeda, including to Osama bin Laden personally. Personnel, money, and explosives tied to terrorist actions in Europe have been traced back to Kosovo, such as the bombings in Madrid (2004) and London (2005) and a 2006 rocket attack on the U.S. embassy in Athens. Now, with the stymied Fort Dix assault, we see that Kosovo blowback has reached America.

What now really needs to be asked is how terrorists from the faraway Balkans were able to plan an operation here in the U.S. The ugly truth is that for almost a decade the U.S. government – or more precisely a handful of State Department bureaucrats and a few Congressmen – have placed the U.S. firmly on the side of the KLA and have helped created a haven for their operations. Even worse, KLA supporters in the United States have operated with virtual impunity, collecting money and weapons to fuel Albanian jihad operations not only in Kosovo, but in neighboring areas of southern Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and northern Greece. In 2004 Dutch television broadcast a documentary of Kosovo Albanian Muslims legally buying weapons in the U.S. (including heavy 50 caliber rifles) and shipping them to Kosovo in support of their “liberation war” in violation of numerous U.S. laws, including the Neutrality Act. The documentary then showed the same Albanians at a fundraiser in New York writing hefty checks to American politicians of both parties. There is no public indication that any action was taken by federal or state law enforcement agencies.

Amazingly, the State Department remains convinced that the only “solution” for Kosovo is to detach it formally from Serbia and to make it an independent state. This would mean officially handing authority over to the criminal and jihad terrorist KLA leadership, who would then be empowered as a “sovereign” government. The Democratic Chairmen of both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee have stated explicitly their support for Kosovo independence as creating a “Muslim democracy in the heart of Europe,” which will win America the goodwill of the Islamic world. At a House hearing on April 17, Kosovo’s Albanian Muslims were hailed as the most pro-American people in the world.

We now see their pro-Americanism in action in New Jersey. Far from impressing the jihadists with America’s beneficence, U.S. support for Kosovo independence only has served to incubate the embryo of a failed jihad and organized crime state, just like Taliban-ruled Afghanistan before 9/11. And this one already has tentacles extending to our shores, as we now see. Both for European stability and the demands of justice, but especially for our own safety at home, America urgently needs to reexamine and change its misguided and self-destructive support for Kosovo’s Albanian jihad.

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The American Council for Kosovo is an independent U.S. nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting a better American understanding of the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija and of the critical American stake in the province's future.

The Council's mission is to make accurate information and analysis about Kosovo available to officials of the Executive and Legislative branches of the U.S. Government; to think tanks, media, NGOs, religious and advocacy organizations; and to the general public.